Talk:Friedrich Nietzsche/@comment-3338975-20120711014828
"Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space." - This need not be "horrifying and paralyzing", though it certainly has the potential to be, and I disagree with Nietzche that it's the heaviest weight ''imaginable for one to pyschologically bear up under. Imagine that the universe recurs in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time and space, but with the addendum that the self-similar form itself is understood as necessarily unstable ground which one's own body must be co-identified with. The eternal return of the universe's perpetual drive towards self-cessation is all the more difficult to bear up under than the solidity of Nietzche's concept of eternal return taken in itself, and the embrace of it would not so much be a tragedian's love of fate (which one could at least claim as a personal distinction) as it would be a humbling reassociation of one's very being with the basic conditions which gave life its potential in the first place. As the Overman can only truly be the Overman if he is able to truly will the eternal return of his entire life inclusive of his failures and misdeeds, the symbol is clearly that of the tragedian ''par excellence, who is able to create new and less decadent values by accepting the existence of the low and crude while still recognizing it as such. While this certianly is a more aesthetic pleasing vision of reality than that of the last man of egalitarian modernity, which merely reacts against it in an "ethical" rebellion against the nature of the wider world (Dawkin's proclaimed "rebellion" against one's "selfish genes" seems to a symptom of such a larger cultural disease in my eyes), it does not seem to me to be the highest aesthetic vision of reality possible nor the one most in tune with physical reality. The Overman himself seems to be reacting against a wider vision of reality even as he attempts hold down the last man, unable to accept the universe's perpetual drive towards self-cessation as part of the eternal return of his entire life and thus of his self-evaluated failures and misdeeds, clinging to his own will to power as a stable point of ethical orientation relative to the rest of the world and thus fating himself into being assimilated into the ranks of the last man to wither away alongside them. Only if one is able to truly ''will ''(and not merely passively accept) the eternal return of the universe's perpetual drive towards self-cessation, and therefore that one's own will to power be willfully expended in the service of such general self-cessation, will one be able to set oneself beyond the cramped stance of egalitarian modernity and be fully open to the wideness and increasing complexity of life drawn forward by the incoming future. Ethical creeds would not disappear completely, nor would they be fully absorbed into the aesthetics of power, but instead would cease to be seen as ends in themselves and instead would be seen as mere (but still necessary) markers for the pathway into the wider life made possible in the future.